Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road: A London Novel, in a Time of Discontents

 By Mphuthumi Ntabeni | Literature

Those who know the Caledonian Road, or Cally to it residents and familiar, know that it is a major road in the affluent parts of London Borough of Islington. It is a place of a conglomeration of cultures and diverse communities, independent businesses and vibrant cosmopolitan atmosphere. It is also the subject of the novel Caledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan. The novel is at once a street, a set of social strata, a moral ledger, and a satire that seeks to mirror contemporary London while exposing its fissures. Like a bulging fresco, it overlaps selves, scenes, lures, and betrayals. Its ambition is marvellous, its execution uneven, but when it works, it feels true in a painful way that cuts through pretensions and complacency.

Campbell Flynn, a 52-year-old art historian and public intellectual, is the novel’s centre. He is proud, self-aware, and morally tangled. Once a working-class Glaswegian, he now lives in Islington, married into privilege, and always at risk of being exposed to the very discomforts he insists on diagnosing in others. Into his life comes an African post grad student, Milo Mangasha, who penetrates Flynn’s defences. Milo is the conscience of the novel, and a moral campus of Flynn. He is a hacking activist who expose the scandals of the ‘upper class’: The Upper have been misbehaving for so long they feel they are upholding tradition by continuing to so.

The street’s name, Caledonian, signals O’Hagan’s Scottish roots and the sense that he has crossed both geography and class divides; yet the crossing is never seamless. Flynn carries an outsider’s guilt, an intellectual’s vanity, and a liberal’s handy dismissals.  Alongside Flynn’s personal unravelings of financial, ethical, domestic challenges O’Hagan sketches the broader dystopia of pandemic London, fractured trust in institutions, oligarchs, the illegibility of virtue in celebrity, and the grotesqueries that always lie near the surface when class meets power.  

The novel is richly populated. There are people born in extra wealth, people born in extra want; Russian oligarchs, migrants, artists, politicians, criminals. All these voices are braided along Caledonian Road itself, which becomes at once setting and metaphor. Its geography from Islington through King’s Cross to Holloway becomes a tour of inequality, aspiration, and moral decay.  

 One of the novel’s central themes is disconnection one feels between from their lower class origins to more affluent status; between appearance and integrity; between the edges and centres of London. Flynn is, in many ways, an outsider now contented with being inside, but always looking back, always vulnerable.

The major theme of the book is the collapse of public virtue, which leads to moral decay. The book interrogates the  complicity of elites in all this, the fragility of truth, the instability of reputation, media manipulations and generational resentment. It showcases the blurred line between activism and spectacle. Even the pandemic looms as background setting, is not just a mere crisis, but a mirror for societal inequality. The embroilments with Russian money, human trafficking, hacktivism, power politics are not just story backdrops but active antagonists in themselves.  

 O’Hagan frequently indulges in witty epigrams, in character-sketches that verge on caricature. The cancellability of voices, the hypocrisy of liberal values, the hypocrisies of the educated classes, all are on display, and often lampooned. But there are also moments of genuine tragedy, of regret, of loss, of human frailty whose tension creates the strongest narrative pages.

 The reference to Iain Banks’ The Crow Road offers useful counterpoint. Banks’ novel is, among many things, a coming-of-age, both intellectual and moral; a meditation on missing persons (Uncle Rory), on familial memory, on death, on one’s place in a Scottish landscape, and on the passage from boyhood to awareness. Prentice McHoan’s quest to understand Rory’s disappearance, his father’s beliefs (or lack thereof), sibling rivalry, love and loss, are internal quests, even when they touch on murder, betrayal, the absurd.  

By contrast, Caledonian Road is less concerned with an internal mystery or with mythic disappearance, but is more concerned with exposure and unveiling of hypocrisy, revealing how publicly held virtues translate (or fail to) in private deeds. Where The Crow Road’s narrative might circle around an absence (Rory gone, death unlocated), O’Hagan’s novel is full of uncovered scandals, private misdeeds, moral failures in full view. Banks offer elegy and dark humour, but also a trajectory toward reconciliation (though complicating it); O’Hagan offers fracture, ongoing moral limbo. Both writers use voices of dissent, irony, familial bonds. 

The ambition of the novel is impressive. To cram in the moral, the political, the technological, the familial, the intimate in one novel is a marvellous achievement. O’Hagan is especially good when staking out the details, like the pressure of maintaining the symbols of class, the collision between liberal cosmopolitan values and the uglier resistances of envy, prejudice, power. His character Milo Mangasha, as the student/hacker/activist, provides a mirror of how the new generation relates to hypocrisy, how they pierce public decency and all. The portraits of the London streets, smells, its real estate, its tension between the hopeful and the hopeless, are vivid.

The sheer scale of the book though can be fatiguing. So many plotlines, so many characters that sometimes the novel feels like someone stretching a tapestry until the threads begin to show. At times characters float just short of full credibility; others are recognizably truthful but performative. The satire sometimes slides into caricature, the critique into sermon. There are long stretches where the novel shifts between scenes so rapidly or over-describes social signifiers through names of restaurants, salons, schools, to extent that the weight of discreet human interiority gets squeezed. Moreover, for readers outside the U.K., or even outside London, some of the status markers may feel over-specific, though rich, but unrelatable. I could sustain my own interest because of familiarity with the area because is where some of my friends live, and so I often visit.

Caledonian Road will not satisfy everyone. Those who seek tightly focused moral or psychological drama may chafe at its breadth; those who prefer understated realism may find its satirical barbs too loud. But as a state-of-Britain novel, one that tries to catch the dissonance of the post everything life, it is important, sometimes uncomfortable, often provocative. It insists that we look at how privilege is defended, how identity is claimed and then lost, how appearances arm themselves in virtue even while doing harm.

While The Crow Road left me with a melancholic sorrow mingled with hope, Caledonian Road leaves me with a bleaker exhilaration of extinguishing hope; compromised virtue and all. It is likely to be one of those novels people will return to when thinking through how London in 2021 and 2022 lived, stumbled, and perhaps began to fray at the edges. It is one of the greatest novels of our era. I am surprised it has hardly featured in any of the European literature prizes.